Tariq Alihttp://tariqali.org
Thu, 23 Jul 2015 14:09:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.6“The capitulation means more suffering” – On Syriza and austerity in Greecehttp://tariqali.org/archives/3039
http://tariqali.org/archives/3039#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 14:08:19 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=3039In the early hours of 16 July, the Greek parliament voted overwhelmingly to give up its sovereignty and become a semi-colonial appendage of the EU. A majority of the Syriza Central Committee had already come out against the capitulation. There had been a partial general strike. Tsipras had threatened to resign if fifty of his MPs voted against him. In the event six abstained and 32 voted against him, including Yanis Varoufakis, who had resigned as finance minister after the referendum, because, he said, ‘some Eurogroup participants’ had expressed a desire for his ‘“absence” from its meetings’. Now parliament had effectively declared the result of the referendum null and void. Outside in Syntagma Square thousands of young Syriza activists demonstrated against their government. Then the anarchists arrived with Molotov cocktails and the riot police responded with tear-gas grenades. Everyone else left the square and by midnight it was silent again. It’s difficult not to feel depressed by all this. Greece has been betrayed by a government that when elected only six months ago offered hope. As I walked away from the empty square the EU’s coup brought back memories of another.

I first went to Greece at Easter 1967. The occasion was a peace conference in Athens honouring the left-wing Greek deputy, Grigoris Lambrakis, murdered by fascists in Salonika in 1963 as the police looked on, and later immortalised in Costa-Gavras’s movie Z. Half a million people attended his funeral in Athens. During the conference wild rumours began to spread around the hall. On the podium, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam couldn’t understand why people had stopped listening to him. Someone with family connections in the military had reported that the Greek military, backed by Washington, was about to launch a coup to pre-empt elections in which they feared the left might do a bit too well. The foreign delegates were advised to leave the country straightaway. I caught an early-morning flight back to London. That afternoon tanks occupied the streets. Greece remained under the Colonels for the next seven years.

I went to Athens this month for the same reason: to speak at a conference, this one ironically entitled ‘Rising Democracy’. Waiting for a friend in a café in Exarchia, I heard people discussing when the government would collapse. Tsipras still has supporters convinced that he will triumph whenever the next election is held. I’m not so sure. It has been an inglorious six months. The young people who voted for Syriza in large numbers and who went out and campaigned enthusiastically for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum are trying to come to grips with what’s happened. The café was packed with them, arguing furiously. At the beginning of the month they were celebrating the ‘No’ vote. They were prepared to make more sacrifices, to risk life outside the Eurozone. Syriza turned its back on them. The date 12 July 2015, when Tsipras agreed to the EU’s terms, will become as infamous as 21 April 1967. The tanks have been replaced by banks, as Varoufakis put it after he was made finance minister.

Greece, in fact, has a lot of tanks, because the German and French arms industries, eager to get rid of surplus hardware in a world where wars are fought by bombers and drones, bribed the politicians. During the first decade of this century Greece was among the top five importers of weapons, mainly from the German companies Ferrostaal, Rheinmetall and Daimler-Benz. In 2009, the year after the crash, Greece spent €8 billion – 3.5 per cent of GDP – on defence. The then Greek defence minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, who accepted huge bribes from these companies, was convicted of corruption by a Greek court in 2013. Prison for the Greek; small fines for the German bosses. None of this has been mentioned by the financial press in recent weeks. It didn’t quite tally with the need to portray Greece as the sole transgressor. Yet a Greek court has been provided with conclusive evidence that the largest tax avoider in the country is Hochtief, the giant German construction company that runs Athens airport. It has not paid VAT for twenty years, and owes 500 million euros in VAT arrears alone. Nor has it paid the contributions due to social security. Estimates suggest that Hochtief’s total debt to the exchequer could top one billion euros.

It is often in times of crisis that radical politicians discover how useless they are. Paralysed by the discovery that those they thought were friends are not their friends at all, they worry about outrunning their voters and lose their nerve. When their enemies, surprised that they have agreed to more than the pound of flesh demanded, demand more still, the trapped politicians finally turn to their supporters, only to discover that the people are way ahead of them: 61 per cent of Greeks voted to reject the bailout offer.

It’s no longer a secret here that Tsipras and his inner circle were expecting a ‘Yes’ or a very narrow ‘No’. Taken by surprise, they panicked. An emergency cabinet meeting showed them in full retreat. They refused to get rid of the ECB placeman in charge of the Greek State Bank, and rejected the idea of nationalising the banks. Instead of embracing the referendum results, Tsipras capitulated. Varoufakis was sacrificed. The EU ministers loathed him because he spoke to them as an equal and his ego was a match for Schäuble’s.

Why did Tsipras hold a referendum at all? ‘He’s so hard and ideological,’ Merkel complained to her advisers. If only. It was a calculated risk. He thought the ‘Yes’ camp would win, and planned to resign and let EU stooges run the government. The EU leaders launched a propaganda blitz and pressured the Greek banks to restrict access to deposits, warning that a ‘No’ vote meant Grexit. Tsipras’s acceptance of Varoufakis’s resignation was an early signal to the EU that he was about to cave in. Euclid Tsakalotos, his mild-mannered successor, won the rapid approval of Schäuble: here was someone he could do business with. Syriza accepted everything, but when more was demanded, more was given. This had nothing to do with the economy, and everything to do with politics. ‘They crucified Tsipras,’ an EU official told the FT. Greece had sold its sovereignty for a third bailout and an IMF promise to help reduce its debt burden – Syriza had begun to resemble the worm-ridden cadaver of the discredited Pasok.

It, too, was once a party of the left. In 1981, when it first came to power, its leader, Andreas Papandreou, was hugely popular and in his first six months in office he pushed through real reforms – not the regressions that neoliberals call ‘reforms’ today. Many students radicalised by the struggle against the dictatorship, as well as many Marxist intellectuals who had contested US hegemony, flocked to join it. Within a few years some of the best known among them had been integrated morally and politically within the new structures of power as Papandreou took the country into the EU. But as the years passed Pasok degenerated. In this century it has been virtually indistinguishable from its old rival, New Democracy.

Syriza is a child of the current crisis and the movements spawned by it. A political instrument was needed to challenge the existing parties and Syriza was it. The aims that Tsipras has now abandoned were listed in the Thessaloniki programme, republished below, which the party accepted unanimously in September last year.

On their first trip to Berlin on 20 February this year, Schäuble made clear to Tsipras and Varoufakis that their programme was incompatible with membership of the Eurozone. Tsipras agreed to put the programme on hold and was offered a few ‘concessions’: the Troika – the auditors representing the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – was replaced with a structure that was supposedly more accountable and whose bureaucrats would not be allowed to enter Greek ministries. This was claimed by Tsipras and Varoufakis as a victory. The truth was the opposite. It is now known that Schäuble offered an amicable, organised Grexit and a cheque for 50 billion euros. This was refused on the grounds that it would seem to be a capitulation. This is bizarre logic. It would have preserved Greek sovereignty, and if Syriza had taken charge of the Greek banking system a recovery could have been planned on its terms. The offer was repeated later. ‘How much do you want to leave the Eurozone?’ Schäuble asked Varoufakis just before the referendum. Again Schäuble was snubbed. Of course the Germans made the offer for their own reasons, but a planned Grexit would have been far better for Greece than what has happened.

When capitalism went into crisis in 2008, the scale of the disaster was such that Joseph Stiglitz was convinced it was the end of neoliberalism, that new economic structures would be needed. Wrong, alas, on both counts. The EU rejected any notion of stimulus, except for the banks whose recklessness, backed by politicians, had been responsible for the crisis in the first place. Taxpayers in Europe and the United States gave trillions to the banks. The Greek debt by comparison was trivial. But the EU didn’t want to make any shifts that could damage the process of financialisation that they had insisted was the only way forward. Greece, the weakest link in the EU chain, went first, followed by Spain, Portugal, Ireland. Italy was on the brink. The Troika dictated the policies to be followed in all these countries. Conditions in Greece have been horrific: a quarter of a million Greeks applied for humanitarian relief to buy food and help with rent and electricity; the percentage of children living in poverty leaped from 23 per cent in 2008 to 40.5 per cent in 2014 and is now approaching 50 per cent. In March 2015 youth unemployment stood at 49.7 per cent, 300,000 people had no access to electricity and the Prolepsis Institute of Preventive Medicine found that 54 per cent of Greeks were undernourished. Pensions dropped by 27 per cent between 2011 and 2014. Syriza insisted that this constituted collective punishment, and that a new ‘deal’ was needed, one that aimed to bring some improvement to the conditions of everyday life.

The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented. The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone. This is indisputable. But isn’t it dangerous, as well as wrong, to punish the Greek people – and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies? According to Timothy Geithner, the former US treasury secretary, the attitude of the European finance ministers at the start of the crisis was: ‘We’re going to teach the Greeks a lesson. They lied to us, they suck and they were profligate and took advantage of the whole thing and we’re going to crush them.’ Geithner says that in reply he told them, ‘You can put your foot on the neck of those guys if that’s what you want to do,’ but insisted that investors mustn’t be punished, which meant that the Germans had to underwrite a large chunk of the Greek debt. As it happens, French and German banks had the most exposure to Greek debt and their governments acted to protect them. Bailing out the rich became EU policy. Debt restructuring is being discussed now, with the IMF’s leaked report, but the Germans are leading the resistance to it. ‘No guarantees without control’: Merkel’s response in 2012 remains in force.

The capitulation means more suffering, but it has also led to questions being asked more widely about the EU, its structures and its policies. For Greeks of virtually all political persuasions the EU was once seen as a family to which one must belong. It has turned out to be a pretty dysfunctional family. I hadn’t been thinking of voting in the EU referendum in Britain whenever it takes place. Now I will. I’ll vote ‘No’.

It is ten years since the horrifiying 7/7 suicide bombings in central London; that killed 56 people, including the four attackers. With this in mind, we bring you an extract from Tariq Ali’sRough Music, a corruscating attack on the state of Tony Blair’s Britain first published in 2005.

In this extract, Ali admonishes not only the perpretators of the attacks but also those in power who apportioned the blame of these suicide attacks to Muslim communities and the poverty and religious fundamentalism that lurked within. Ali argued, however, that evidence points to religion used only as a means in which terrorist groups garner support to serve much broader strategic targets, such the urgent withdrawal of Western government’s military forces from the countries they consider their homeland.

Ten years on, Britain and its Western allies are culpabie in causing and exacerbating many of the world’s current conflicts. The crushing of civil liberties and the deliberate targeting of Muslim communities in Western countries, in order to root out ‘extremism’, has further marginalised and angered Muslims. Further afield, the sectarian violence in Iraq, caused by British and American occupation, and endemic corruption in Afghanistan, a country lead for just under ten years by a stanch ally of the West, Hamid Karzai. There have been extensive arms deals with Saudi Arabia, currently spearheading military attacks in Yemen, and Libya, embroiled in a nasty civil war ever since the Arab Spring and the fall of Gadaffi in 2011. It doesn’t bear thinking about what intervention might do within the sheer complexity of Syria and the relentless march of Islamic State.

Ali’s essay is a timely reminder of lessons that the West have failed to heed time and time again.

British politicians have learnt from their American superiors that there is one continent to which they can always turn to burnish their do-gooding credentials in times of war or scandal. If Africa did not exist, rich-world governments would have to invent it. The need was great in July 2005. The war in Iraq was going badly, the EU Constitution débâcle had been an embarrassingly large-scale defeat for Blairite free-marketism on the continent, and the British economy was starting to splutter. As the leaders of the G8 gathered for their Summit in Scotland, hosted by Blair, Iraq was naturally banished from the public agenda and anti-war marchers were banned from the barricaded Gleneagles Hotel. The Summit was designed as a feel-good-do-nothing affair. Poverty in Africa—in large part the result of vicious IMF and World Bank restructuring programmes, as well as the debt burdens imposed by those institutions—would be magicked away, as if in a rerun of the miracle of loaves and ?shes.

Blair’s favourite courtier from the musical world, Bob Geldof, was hired to organize an extravaganza in Edinburgh that would hopefully attract the crowds away from anti-war protests. Geldof is a specialist in make-the-locals-feel-good events. He certainly makes the Prime Minister feel loved. A photograph of Blair and Geldof in the press showed a ?irtatious musician resting his head on the Dear Leader’s shoulder. I was pleased to see that the photo opportunities with Gordon Brown were more sober. Geldof, like the G8 leaders, is deeply concerned about poverty in Africa, and organizes a concert to prove it every twelve years. But the razzmatazz would soon be upstaged in London

On 7 July 2005 a deadly quartet of three young Yorkshire Muslims and a Jamaican-born co-religionist from Aylesbury, their rucksacks loaded with explosives, blew themselves up more or less simultaneously, three of them at different points on the London Underground and one on a bus in Russell Square, not far from the British Museum. Fifty-six people died as a result and a hundred or so were wounded. Coming at the height of the rush-hour, the victims of this senseless carnage were mainly young of?ce-workers; statistically, it’s unlikely that more than one in ?ve of them voted for Blair. It was a horrendous act, politically and morally unjusti?able. But there was no mystery as to why it had happened. Before the invasion, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had warned Blair of the consequences of dragging the country into an unpopular war: ‘An assault on Iraq will in?ame world opinion and jeopardize security and peace everywhere. London, as one of the major world cities, has a great deal to lose from war and a lot to gain from peace, international cooperation and global stability.’

This was not, of course, the ?rst time that London and other British cities had been targeted by bombers opposing the British government. After ‘Bloody Sunday’, the IRA brought the Irish war to mainland Britain for the last phase of ‘the troubles’. They came close to blowing up Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton during a Conservative Party conference. Later, IRA members ?red a missile from a moving van at 10 Downing Street. London’s ?nancial quarter was also hit, causing immense damage to property. The successive Prevention of Terrorism Acts passed by the House of Commons, the introduction of ‘internment without trial’ and the general massacring of civil liberties both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland did nothing to prevent these and other attacks. There were lessons to be learnt from this history, as I argued in a short comment for the Guardian the day after the July 7th bombings:

The majority of Londoners (as the rest of the country) were opposed to the war in Iraq. Tragically, it is they who have suffered the blow and paid the price for the re-election of Blair and a continuation of the war. Ever since 9/11, I have been arguing that the ‘war against terror’ is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror—bombing raids, tortures, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq—against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small, but whose reach is deadly. The solution then, as now is political, not military. The British ruling elite understood this perfectly well in the case of Ireland. Security measures, anti-terror laws rushed through Parliament, identity cards, a general curtailment of civil liberties of British citizens will not solve the problem. If anything, they will push young Muslims in the direction of a mindless violence.

The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday life of most of Europe’s citizens, this does not mean that the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diasporas is insigni?cant. Establishment politicians have little purchase with the young and this applies especially strongly in the Arab world. As long as Western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge. At the beginning of the G8, Tony Blair suggested that ‘poverty was the cause of terrorism’. This is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence that is being in?icted on the people of the Muslim world. The bombing of innocent people is equally barbaric in Baghdad, Jenin, Kabul as it is in New York, Madrid or London. And unless this is recognized the horrors will continue.(1)

The following day I was denounced in the Guardian Letters column with an unsurprising degree of illiberal acrimony; what was more surprising was that not a single letter appeared in support of my position, since during the course of the next three days I received an exceptionally large email inbox, some 672 messages. Usually, after a public intervention I receive a maximum of a hundred or so missives and the supporters:critics ratio averages at 80:20. On this occasion it was 95:5. It was obvious that many people had immediately linked the bombings to the outrages committed by the Anglo-American occupiers of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that they did not like the way debate on the subject was being sidelined.

This linkage between the horri?c London bombings and the horrors of the Middle East was exactly what the political-media bubble was determined to prevent. Here the propaganda machinery was in full ?ow. The regime and its apologists united in blocking out any mention of a connection with Iraq. It took the Liberal Democratic leader a whole week to mutter something to the effect that it was possible that there might be some link to the war in Iraq. He was immediately denounced by Downing Street for breaching the consensus agreed inside the bubble.

From Gleneagles, Blair’s immediate response to the bombings had been predictably Bushite. Barbarians were attacking ‘our civilization’. No other explanation would be countenanced. Why were these ‘barbarians’ not targeting Paris or Berlin? Why Madrid and London? Could it be that these appalling acts had something to do with the continuing war in Iraq where the ‘civilized’ conquerors do not even bother to count the Iraqi dead? That these questions were not con?ned to anti-war activists was con?rmed by Alan Cowell, writing in the New York Times on 8 July 2005:

Perhaps the crudest lesson to be drawn was that, in adopting the stance he took after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Blair had ?nally reaped the bitter harvest of the war on terrorism—so often forecast but never quite seeming real until the explosions boomed across London. The war in Iraq has been increasingly unpopular here, with taunts that Mr. Blair had become President Bush’s poodle. The anger about Iraq led to Mr. Blair’s shaky showing in the May elections: a third term with a severely reduced majority.

Now, as long predicted and feared, his support of the war appears to have cost British lives at home. Thursday was a day of rallying behind the leader, but there were indications that the bombing could take a political toll.

The following week, an opinion poll—unusually, tucked away on an inside page of the newspaper that had commissioned it—revealed that 66 per cent of the population believed there was a link between Blair’s decision to invade Iraq and the terror attacks in London (2). Tame journalists and Labour ministers who had justi?ed the war—Straw, Reid and the rest—still refused to accept there was any connection between the savage chaos in Baghdad and the bombs in London. On 26 July, Blair arrogantly reiterated his position:

We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that.

Yet Foreign Of?ce of?cials had warned the government in May 2004, over a year before the the bombs hit London, that the war in Iraq was stoking the ?res of extremism in Muslim communities in Britain. In a letter addressed to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Of?ce Michael Jay had spelled it out for Downing Street:

Other colleagues have ?agged up some of the potential underlying causes of extremism that can affect the Muslim community, such as discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion. But another recurring theme is the issue of British foreign policy, especially in the context of the Middle East Peace Process and Iraq… Experience of both ministers and of?cials working in this area suggests that the issue of British foreign policy… plays a signi?cant role in creating a feeling of anger and impotence amongst especially the younger generation of British Muslims . . . this seems to be a key driver behind recruitment by extremist organizations (e.g. recruitment drives by groups such as Hizb ut-Tehrir and al Muhajiroon).(3)

The political motives of suicide bombers have been underlined by Robert Pape, a US academic working on a University of Chicago project on suicide terrorism. Pape has analysed such attacks in very great detail and produced a serious and sober study of suicide terrorism over the past 25 years. It should be compulsory reading for members of the British government. Pape analyses 315 suicide terror attacks during this period and concludes that ‘there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any of the world’s religions’. Instead:

what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a speci?c secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.(4)

This analysis is con?rmed by the stories of the July 7th bombers, and of the pathetic group that apparently attempted further London Transport bombings on July 21st, but whose rucksacks failed to explode. Osman Hussain, suspected of trying to set off an explosion at Warren Street Station on July 21st, ?ed the country by Eurostar and was arrested in Italy a few weeks later. According to La Repubblica, he told investigators that the would-be bombers of July 21st had psyched themselves for the attacks by watching ‘?lms on the war in Iraq… Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers…of widows, mothers and daughters that cry.’

The discrepancy between the price tag the Western media place on their own citizens—the photos of smiiing faces, the intimate details recalled by friends and family—and on the tens of thousands of those nameless, uncounted bodies shot, tortured or blown up from 30,000 feet on the command of Bush and Blair, could hardly be starker. It is this that fuels the anger.

Further direct evidence of the political motives of the terrorists came in the ghoulish video tape left behind by Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the July 7th suicide terrorists, and later broadcast by al-Jazeera TV. (His friends in Dewsbury, of whom there are many since he was a popular youth worker, claimed the tape was a fake. Perhaps deep down they did not want to believe that their friend had become a terrorist or maybe the denial was a way of protecting themselves from hostile journalists.) Speaking in a strong Yorkshire accent, Siddique Khan stated: ‘Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible.’ With Blair now off holidaying at Cliff Richard’s luxury villa in Barbados, the British government response was left to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who still refused to accept this, insisting that British support for Bush had not made the country more vulnerable to terrorism.

To explain the cause is not to justify the consequence, but Blair and his toadies should be forced to confront what is now a widely held view across the political divide: the central British role in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and, more broadly, Britain’s unquestioning support for the US–Israeli war drive in the Middle East and across central Eurasia, has blown back in the shape of the London terrorist attacks. The reason the Prime Minister and his close associates in government and the media cannot admit the link is not dif?cult to understand. To accept that British foreign policy is even partially responsible means to accept that Blair, Straw and the rest of the supine Cabinet and the of?cial Opposition are to blame for what is taking place. If Blair were to do so he would be immediately compelled to resign.

This a historic triumph for Greece, its people and democratic accountability. The disgusting campaign waged by the EU Group and ECB has backfired sensationally. The invertebrate Greek politicians who voted YES misjudged the mood of their people. The EU leaders who waged a financial war on Greece should look in the mirror. If what they see is ugly, they should not blame the mirror. The Syriza triumph is a victory. How should it be interpreted? A slap in the face of the EU elite and the Troika; a signal that people are ahead of the politicians and prepared to go further. They have seen their government pleading, begging on its knees for an agreement. They have seen SYRIZA abandon its programme and their response is don’t go any further. Take a tougher position. Don’t capitulate. Fight back. We are with you. The minute Tsipras decided to go for a referendum, the mass movement was revived. ?

The questions that arise immediately are the following:

?If there is no serious agreement on any meaningful debt restructuring is the government prepared to default? If the EU stance remains the same is SYRIZA prepared to quit the Eurozone and implement Plan B?

?I hope so. The Greek negotiators now know that their people will support them further if they are told the truth. That is what Tsipras did at the historic Syntagma mass demonstration last week and we have the response. The Greek people have reasserted their sovereignty. Their government must now do the same.

]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/3012/feed0We are witnessing the twilight of democracyhttp://tariqali.org/archives/3007
http://tariqali.org/archives/3007#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 16:55:46 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=3007Instead of worrying too much about the extreme left and right, we should focus more on the extreme center, says writer Tariq Ali. He spoke to Creston Davis about the decline of democracy and German hegemony in Europe.

Creston Davis: Mr. Ali, with regards to your most recent book, The Extreme Center: A Warning, what are the characteristics that define extremism in your opinion?
Tariq Ali: For one, continuous wars—which we have now had since 2001—starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it’s been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn’t over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they’re being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union. So that is the first extremism. The second extremism is the unremitting assault on ordinary people, citizens inside European and North American states, by a capitalist system which is rapacious, blind, and concerned with only one thing: making money and enhancing the profits of the 1%. So I would say that these two are the central pillars of the extreme center. Add to that the level of surveillance and new laws which have been put on the statute books of most countries: the imprisonment of people without trial for long periods, torture, its justification, etc.

Davis: Normally we think of extremes on the far right and the far left. In this case, you are articulating an extreme of the center. How did you arrive at that analysis?
Ali: Well, I was giving a talk and in response to a question on the extreme left and the extreme right, I said that while these forces exist, they’re not very strong—through the extreme right is getting stronger. I observed that the reason the extreme right is getting stronger is because of the extreme center, and then I explained it. So that’s how the idea developed. The people at the talk were interested, and so I developed it further and thought about it over the next months. Many people were intrigued by it, and so I sat down and wrote this little book.

Davis: The book also addresses the “suicide of Western politics.” What are the basic elements of that?
Ali: It’s not just politics. Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy. I’m not the first to say it, and I won’t be the last. Others have dealt with the issue. Peter Mair—alas no longer with us—who used to teach at the European University, wrote a book for instance which was published posthumously. Also the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who has been mapping what has been happening to democracy in the European Union and elsewhere. I’ve developed from some of these people’s writings the idea that the extreme center is the political expression of the neoliberal state. That economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative—alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations—becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

Davis: Do you think there is hope in the rise of Syriza, Podemos, Sinn Féin and other Left political parties?
Ali: Well, I think Syriza and Podemos are very, very different from Sinn Féin in many ways, and so I wouldn’t put all three together. I would say that Syriza and Podemos are movements which have come out of mass struggles. In the case of Podemos, directly out of huge mass movements in Spain, which started with the occupation of the square. In Greece, as a response to what the EU was doing there, punishing it endlessly, for the sins of its ruling elite. And so the response of the people was finally to elect the Syriza government to take on the Troika and set them up with a new alternative. Its future will depend very much on whether they’re able to do so or not.

Davis: Do you think they will?
Ali: At the moment we have a critical situation in Greece. Even as we speak, where there is an open attempt by the EU to destroy Syriza by splitting it. There is a German obstinacy and utter refusal to seriously consider an alternative. The reason isn’t even a lack of money, because money swims around the EU coffers endlessly, and they could write off the debt tomorrow if they wanted. But they don’t want to do so, because of the election of a left-wing government. They want to punish Syriza in public, to humiliate it so that this model doesn’t go any further than Greece. We are seeing a struggle between the Syriza government and the Troika—as well as the American side, the IMF—with very little room for any compromise. In my opinion, Syriza has already gone too far.

Davis: What would the latter choice look like?
Ali: They could just say, “No, this is not a debt which has been incurred by the Greek people. This is a debt incurred by the elite, and the reason this debt has mounted is because our books were not in order when we were let into the Euro currency, and the Germans knew that. The whole of Europe knew that.” They could refuse to pay and chart a new course. Whether they can do this on their own without the support of the Greek people is a moot point.

Davis: How has the idea of economics hijacking politics played out in the European Union more generally?
Ali: The European Union is a union of the extreme center. It’s a banker’s union. You see how they operate in country after country, appointing technocrats to take over and run countries for long periods. They did it in Greece; they did it in Italy; they considered it in other parts of Europe. So it’s effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it’s undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign. How could it be when Europe is divided into so many different states? The decisions are all made by the representatives of the different members of the European Union, i.e. the governments of Europe, which are extreme center governments in most cases. And so, the European Union has lost virtually all of its credibility amongst large swaths of the European population. In recent election in Britain for instance, the big point of debate—among a few others—between the Labour and Conservative parties was whether or not to have a referendum on Europe, whether or not to allow people to state their choice, to vote on how they feel in relation to Europe.

Davis: And in other parts of Europe?
Ali: Effectively, the EU is a very powerful bureaucracy, dominated now by the German elite, which is backed by the rest of the European Union members. If you go to former Yugoslav states, the Balkan states, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, the situation is dire. Not to mention Bosnia, which is just run like a colony. The way they used to stand up and sing hymns to President Tito, they now salute the EU flag. It’s a very strange transition that we’re witnessing in most of Europe, and I don’t think it’s going to work. I think another crisis, which is being predicted now and which will be worse than what we saw in 2008, could bring the European Union down unless there are huge reforms from within to democratize, to give more power to the regions, etc. If this doesn’t happen, the European Union will fall.

Davis: Many intellectuals here in Athens agree with you that the EU is backed by the German elite. Some even go as far as to say that it’s Germany trying to take control of Europe once again.
Ali: I know this argument. It’s not invisible. It’s there for everyone to see. But I think to compare it to the Third Reich is utterly ludicrous. Germany is a capitalist state nurtured carefully and brought back to prosperity by the United States, and it is very loyal to the United States. I don’t even think the Germans enjoy full sovereignty. There are some things which they cannot do if the United States doesn’t wish them to do it. So, one cannot discuss Europe without understanding US imperial hegemony, both globally and certainly in Europe as it stands. It’s an alliance that the Americans control, in which the EU of course has a great deal of autonomy, but in which it still is very dependent on the United States, especially militarily, but not only in that respect. So to blame the Germans for everything is an easy way out for some of those suffering in Europe today. At the time of German Reunification, it was no secret that Germany would soon become the strongest political entity in the European Union. And that has happened.

Davis: So it was inevitable that Germany would act this way?
Ali: Any country in that position would exert its authority. The real problem is the total capitulation of German social democracy to capitalism, reflected and symbolized by actual extreme center coalition governments in Germany, which have been in power for a long time and still are even as we speak. That is the real problem: that there is no serious opposition in Germany at all. And the Left party is divided. There are huge political problems in that country, but German economic power is something which was bound to happen. The way out of this situation is through the further democratization of the European Union and a changing of its structures. The current Eurozone is obviously dysfunctional. And serious people within Germany and elsewhere know this to be the case and know things cannot function this way forever. If there is a Greek exit from the Eurozone, I think the German elite will be quite pleased that they can then use that to restructure the Eurozone and make it a zone where only strong countries are allowed in. There would then be two tiers within the European Union, which is in fact already happening. But you cannot simply get rid of German control by raising the specter of the Third Reich. That’s ahistorical.

]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/3007/feed0Tariq Ali interviewed by Dialogos Radio about the political situation in Greecehttp://tariqali.org/archives/3002
http://tariqali.org/archives/3002#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 15:38:37 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=3002An interview with renowned scholar, author, and analyst Tariq Ali, on the political events in Greece and Europe, his views of the first months of the SYRIZA-led government, and his upcoming visit to Greece.

]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/3002/feed0Tariq Ali Testimony in the Paris Mock Trial of Bernard Henri-Levyhttp://tariqali.org/archives/2999
http://tariqali.org/archives/2999#commentsThu, 18 Jun 2015 09:40:23 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=2999
]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/2999/feed0Spain at a Crossroads – Interview with Pablo Iglesiashttp://tariqali.org/archives/2997
http://tariqali.org/archives/2997#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 16:06:17 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=2997
]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/2997/feed0My hero: Eduardo Galeanohttp://tariqali.org/archives/2986
http://tariqali.org/archives/2986#commentsTue, 21 Apr 2015 15:47:10 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=2986In Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, the eponymous antihero is confronted by his student, who is livid that the great man has recanted: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo’s response is calm: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” And he continues to work on his manuscript, which he then hands to his estranged pupil, who realises at the end of the play that what is really important has been achieved. The ideas will survive. My late friend and comrade, the Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano, who died this week, never recanted his beliefs in private or in public. Nor did he believe in heroes.
His entire work is suffused with the idea of mass democracy, whereby the poor and oppressed achieve self-emancipation through common action for limited or broader goals. Galeano was a modern-day Simón Bolívar, trying to achieve with his pen what the liberator had attempted with the sword: the unity of their continent against empires old and new. He spoke for the underground voices of the continent when US-backed military dictatorships crushed democracy in most parts of South America; he spoke for those being tortured, for indigenous people crushed by the dual oppression of empire and creole oligarchs.

Was he optimistic or pessimistic? Both, often together, but he never gave up hope. The right to dream, he insisted, should be inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That remained strong all his life. It is visible in his lyrical works on South American history. History written as poetry, three volumes of vignettes, each of them a pearl that went to make a stunning necklace. It is there in his journalism from Marcha in 1960s Uruguay to La Jornada in Mexico today. He was never dogmatic, always open to new ideas.

After the tyranny of the military dictatorships he realised that the armed road had been a disaster, that the Cuban revolution could not be imitated blindly. The birth of new social movements and the Bolivarian victories were both a source of inspiration and concern. He did not want to see old mistakes repeated. Whenever we met this was very strong in him. We were not simply defeated by the enemy, he would insist, but also, to a certain extent, by ourselves. Revolutionaries are not infallible.

]]>http://tariqali.org/archives/2970/feed0The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution – Interview with Chris Hedgeshttp://tariqali.org/archives/2957
http://tariqali.org/archives/2957#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 11:02:39 +0000http://tariqali.org/?p=2957 PRINCETON, N.J.—Tariq Ali is part of the royalty of the left. His more than 20 books on politics and history, his seven novels, his screenplays and plays and his journalism in the Black Dwarf newspaper, the New Left Review and other publications have made him one of the most trenchant critics of corporate capitalism. He hurls rhetorical thunderbolts and searing critiques at the oily speculators and corporate oligarchs who manipulate global finance and the useful idiots in the press, the political system and the academy who support them. The history of the late part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century has proved Ali, an Oxford-educated intellectual and longtime gadfly who once stood as a Trotskyist candidate for Parliament in Britain, to be stunningly prophetic.

The Pakistani-born Ali, who holds Pakistani and British citizenships, was already an icon of the left during the convulsions of the 1960s. Mick Jagger is said to have written “Street Fighting Man” after he attended an anti-war rally in Grosvenor Square on March 17, 1968, led by Ali, Vanessa Redgrave and others outside the U.S. Embassy in London. Some 8,000 protesters hurled mud, stones and smoke bombs at riot police. Mounted police charged the crowd. Over 200 people were arrested.

Ali, when we met last week shortly before he delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, praised the street clashes and open, sustained protests against the state that erupted during the Vietnam War. He lamented the loss of the radicalism that was nurtured by the 1960s counterculture, saying it was “unprecedented in imperial history” and produced the “most hopeful period” in the United States, “intellectually, culturally and politically.”
“I cannot think of an example of any other imperial war in history, and not just in the history of the American empire but in the history of the British and French empires, where you had tens of thousands of former GIs and sometimes serving GIs marching outside the Pentagon and saying they wanted the Vietnamese to win,” he said. “That is a unique event in the annals of empire. That is what frightened and scared the living daylights out of them [those in power]. If the heart of our apparatus is becoming infected, [they asked] what the hell are we going to do?”

This defiance found expression even within the halls of the Establishment. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings about the Vietnam War openly challenged and defied those who were orchestrating the bloodshed. “The way that questioning was conducted educated a large segment of the population,” Ali said of the hearings, led by liberals such as J. William Fulbright. Ali then added sadly that “such hearings could never happen again.”

“That [spirit is what the ruling elite] had to roll back, and that they did quite successfully,” he said. “That rollback was completed by the implosion of the Soviet Union. They sat down and said, ‘Great, now we can do whatever we want. There is nothing abroad, and what we have at home—kids protesting about South America and Nicaragua and the contras—is peanuts. Gradually the dissent decreased.” By the start of the Iraq War, demonstrations, although large, were usually “one-day affairs.”

“It was an attempt to stop a war. Once they couldn’t stop it, that was the end,” he said about the marches opposing the Iraq War. “It was a spasm. They [authorities] made people feel there was nothing they could do; that whatever people did, those in power would do what they wanted. It was the first realization that democracy itself had been weakened and was under threat.”

The devolution of the political system through the infusion of corporate money, the rewriting of laws and regulations to remove checks on corporate power, the seizure of the press, especially the electronic press, by a handful of corporations to silence dissent, and the rise of the wholesale security and surveillance state have led to “the death of the party system” and the emergence of what Ali called “an extreme center.” Working people are being ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit—a scenario dramatically on display in Greece. And there is no mechanism or institution left within the structures of the capitalist system to halt or mitigate the reconfiguration of the global economy into merciless neofeudalism, a world of masters and serfs.

“This extreme center, it does not matter which party it is, effectively acts in collusion with the giant corporations, sorts out their interests and makes wars all over the world,” Ali said. “This extreme center extends throughout the Western world. This is why more and more young people are washing their hands of the democratic system as it exists. All this is a direct result of saying to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘There is no alternative.’ ”

The battle between popular will and the demands of corporate oligarchs, as they plunge greater and greater numbers of people around the globe into poverty and despair, is becoming increasingly volatile. Ali noted that even those leaders with an understanding of the destructive force of unfettered capitalism—such as the new, left-wing prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras—remain intimidated by the economic and military power at the disposal of the corporate elites. This is largely why Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, bowed to the demands of European banks for a four-month extension of the current $272 billion bailout for Greece. The Greek leaders were forced to promise to commit to more punishing economic reforms and to walk back from the pre-election promise of Tsipras’ ruling Syriza party to write off a large part of Greece’s sovereign debt. Greece’s debt is 175 percent of its GDP. This four-month deal, as Ali pointed out, is a delaying tactic, one that threatens to weaken widespread Greek support for Syriza. Greece cannot sustain its debt obligations. Greece and European authorities will have to collide. And this collision could trigger a financial meltdown in Greece, see it break free from the eurozone, and spawn popular upheavals in Spain, Portugal and Italy.